2 sex offenders living at Daytona nursing home being investigated

Monday

Jul 28, 2014 at 3:36 PMJul 28, 2014 at 9:43 PM

By Lyda Longalyda.longa@news-jrnl.com

DAYTONA BEACH — Local and state investigators want to question two registered sex offenders who are living in a health care facility where a 75-year-old woman may have been sexually assaulted, police Chief Mike Chitwood said.The chief said he just learned that the two men — John Arthur Lee, 58, and Isaac Rudolph Battles, 56 — are living at the Daytona Beach Health and Rehabilitation Center on Third Street. Both men are registered with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and list the center as their home address.An investigation into the facility was initiated earlier this month after the woman, who has Alzheimer’s and dementia, was taken to Halifax Health Medical Center on July 3 after complaining to her daughter that she was pregnant and experiencing pain in her pelvic region. Doctors at Halifax found no sign of a pregnancy, but they did determine that the septuagenarian had a sexually transmitted disease, the chief said.“We are investigating this with the State Attorney’s Office and other agencies,” Chitwood said Monday. Also involved in the query are the Florida Agency of Health Care Administration and the state’s Department of Children & Families.Shelisha Coleman, a spokeswoman with AHCA, said Monday that it’s not against the law for sex offenders to live in a health care facility or nursing home, and it is not the facility’s responsibility to notify prospective residents that sex offenders live among them.“They are however required to provide proper supervision (of the sex offenders) to ensure that their other residents are safe,” Coleman said.But the health care facility has not been the most forthcoming about its records or its patients.“We are still trying to get a list of all their residents,” the chief said.For more than two weeks, police tried to have interviews with staff and patients as well as obtain copies of records from the nursing home where the woman has been a patient for four years. Center officials balked and police filed a complaint with AHCA, Chitwood said. The chief said he spoke with Eric Miller, the Inspector General for AHCA and was given the go-ahead to take his detectives to the facility, get what they needed for their investigation and record the entire process. An attorney for the center’s parent company, Northport Health Services, told police investigators that they could have the records if they subpoenaed them. Chitwood said subpoenas were issued last week and information from the center was starting to come forward. “We may never know what happened to this woman, but we have to investigate,” Chitwood said.State inspectors recently cited the facility for an immediate jeopardy violation, the most serious deficiency that means residents are in harm’s way. The facility administered medication twice a day to a patient, contrary to a doctor’s order that it should only be given once a day, according to a report written by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. This happened from Jan. 7 to Nov. 17 last year, state inspectors wrote. In June, Daytona Beach Health and Rehabilitation Services settled with the state for $22,000, while denying wrongdoing. The facility has been fined four times since 2005, which included another medication mistake. A resident was given another resident’s medication, records show.On Medicare’s website Nursing Home Compare, the facility received only one out of five stars for health inspections, rating it “much below average.” Its overall rating was two out of five stars, falling into the “below average” category.